This attack didn’t only matter to Kenya, though. As former counterinsurgency strategy specialist David Kilcullen argued when he came to Northwestern, such conflicts will only grow more frequent as the global population gets concentrated in small areas. And as long as America remains the pre-eminent global power, our troops will go where conflict is. Understanding what global terrorism is, and how the United States intends to respond to it, is going to become increasingly important in the next few years.